Brian Masters: Why I love the Spice Girls

Brian Masters, best known for hard-hitting books about serial killers, reveals
his soft spot for Posh and Co
.

The Girls perform at the closing ceremony of this year’s London Olympics.Photo: Rex Features

By Brian Masters

8:30AM GMT 29 Nov 2012

That explosive, exuberant moment of the closing ceremony of this year’s London Olympics – the triumphant procession of five young women standing on top of black London taxi cabs and belting their hearts out – perfectly captured the character and excitement of the Spice Girls. Brash, bold and self-confident, they displayed the sense of style that conquered the world more than a dozen years before and turned five ordinary girls into everybody’s uncomplicated friends. The sight of Victoria in that blazing black dress, the hem flowing out in the warm wind in symmetry with her loose black hair, is unforgettable.

Their supremacy in the pop world was brief, but of permanent appeal. Now a new musical show, Viva Forever!, based not on them but using their music as its cement, has just begun previewing in the West End. Judging by advance sales, the magic has not dissipated.

For me, their secret was paradoxically in their avoidance of group identity. In this, they broke with recent pop tradition. They did not dress identically, but each in her own way, in vibrant contrast with all the others. There was not a so-called “lead singer” among them; they sang with and against one another, so that their voices were almost orchestral (not too big a word) in the way in which they worked together, supporting, overlapping, echoing, ricocheting and nudging each other. They conveyed a fierce energy, and at the same time a jokey frivolity, as if everything was “for a laugh”, even the fact that they were on stage at all.

They were shamelessly exhibitionist, just as their teenage fans were, and this made them utterly real and genuine. Whereas so many pop groups were truly manufactured, moulded and forced into becoming a product to feed the ambitions of studios and tycoons, the Spice Girls were always themselves, out for enjoyment and personal ambition without apology. They were devoid of shyness, which is not to say they were rude or vulgar; they gave the impression that they wanted everyone to join in, and this unsophisticated willingness to share made their songs sound happy. Their effect upon the audience was palpably beneficent.

The individuality of each came across in divergent personalities, which eventually led to their being given distinctive nicknames – Ginger, Baby, Posh, Sporty and Scary – an apparently sudden inspiration of Peter Lorraine of Top of the Pops magazine. No other group had been so distinguished.

The names caught on because the fans could see they were apt. Posh was Victoria with her pout (adopted in adolescence to conceal a gap in her teeth), Melanie B was Scary because she was loud, Emma was Baby because the others wanted to mother her. Geri Halliwell, who needed no explanation as Ginger, was the force behind most of the lyrics they came up with, and also the most cheeky and adventurous.

They came from nowhere. Answering a flyer inviting complete unknowns to audition for a new pop group, they were initially among 300 applicants in March 1994. The final audition to select five took place that May at Nomis Studios, round the corner from me at Olympia, so I caught an early whiff of what might be to come judging by the crowds of hopefuls in the street.

The new group’s first name was Touch, then Spice, and finally Spice Girls. They immediately launched upon a period of intense training, living together like students in shared digs, on the dole, subsisting on sandwiches and small salads. They had been chosen precisely because they had no musical experience, so they underwent an exhausting schedule under the guidance of voice trainer Pepe Lemer. They had to learn everything, from the use of the diaphragm to phrasing and pitch, as well as movement. They needed help, and to their great credit, accepted it. Everyone agrees that they worked very hard indeed (although an opera singer might be allowed a giggle at this point, after sweating through 20 years of training).

They also had guts. It is commonplace nowadays for pop stars not to sing but to move their mouths in miming against a recorded backtrack. Obviously it is cheating, and it robs a performance of spontaneity. The girls decided that they would sing live, with real musicians, both here and in the US, despite the huge challenge to untuned voices. They were fearless, and it worked. As long as one can ignore flat tones stretched out to the end of a line with no variation of shape, the result was nearly always intoxicatingly infectious.

The Spice Girls’ appeal to young children attested to their essential niceness (you cannot pull the wool over the eyes of a child), and their direct attention to adolescent girls, with whom they showed utter solidarity, rather than to eager and greedy boys, demonstrated the ability to be sexually flirtatious without having to entice. They never took drugs. All good marks.

Prince William, when he was 14, stuck a picture of Emma on his bedroom wall at Eton, and his father famously had his bottom pinched by Geri at a Royal Gala. When she left the group, Prince Charles wrote her a personal letter, referring to the memory of her friendly greeting.

To delight eight year-old children and the heir to the throne takes some beating.